by Carla Kovach
‘I don’t think he’s in.’ Gina pulled a card from her bag and posted it through the letterbox. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need to dry off.’
‘You would stand in the rain, guv,’ Jacob said, half-jokingly as they ran back towards the car.
A man pulled up in a van and began to step out. Gina hurried over. ‘Dale Blair?’
He grabbed his keys from the dashboard, oblivious to the fact that she was getting soaked. Raindrops bounced off his fluorescent jacket. ‘No, he lives next door to me. When you do see him, tell him to hurry back and do something about his dog. All night that thing barked and it continues. Who are you? I don’t think we’ve met.’
‘DI Gina Harte.’ She pulled her identification out.
The man scrutinised it then smiled. ‘Is he in trouble?’
‘No, we just need to speak to him in relation to something we’re investigating. Can I please just sit in your van for a moment? I’m getting soaked and I think you may be able to help us.’
The man nodded. ‘Of course.’ Gina put a thumbs up to Jacob who was running the engine to warm himself up. She jogged around to the passenger side and got in, knowing that she’d drench his seats but not caring. Her waterlogged shoes and socks sent a shiver from her feet upwards. Damp had begun to soak into her trousers and was now starting to climb up to her shins.
She rummaged around until she felt her notebook in her bag. From it, she slid the photo of Susan out and held it up with trembling fingers. She hadn’t felt this cold for a long time, almost chilled to the bone. ‘Do you remember seeing this woman over the past few days?’
He took the photo from her with his hard shovel-like hands and began to study it. ‘Yes. I saw her knocking at Dale’s door a couple of days ago, Tuesday, I think. I don’t remember the time. It was mid-afternoon maybe and I was between jobs. I only popped back because I forgot my sandwiches and I was starving. The long and short of it is, my wife passed them to me through the door and waved me off. As she did, I saw this woman going into Dale’s house.’ He pointed to Susan in the photo.
She held up a picture of a car the same as Susan’s. ‘Have you seen this car around?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. She didn’t have a car. She came from that direction.’ He pointed down the path. Gina thought it odd that Susan had turned up without her car to visit a potential client. She gazed up and down the street.
A woman lifted the voile on the front window and peered out.
‘That’s the wife. She’s probably wondering why I’m sitting in the van with a woman she doesn’t know.’ The man jangled his keys. ‘I should get going, if that’s all. I haven’t seen that woman or Dale since. Sorry I can’t be of any more help.’
‘Thank you. I will just brave this weather one more time to ask your wife the same questions. What’s your name?’
‘Don Fellow.’
‘Thank you for your help, Mr Fellow.’ She opened the car door and ran, almost slipping on the slimed over mossy pathway that led to Don’s house. The woman opened the door, her greying blonde hair up in a tight bun. The smell of onions escaped the house – then came a stronger smell. Gina was sure she’d just cooked sausages.
Don hurried past her. ‘This is a detective, love. She wants to know if you’ve seen a woman at Dale’s next door. You know I forgot my sandwiches the other day, there was a woman going into Dale’s house.’
The woman nodded. ‘I saw her, young, pretty, long dark hair.’
Gina held the photo up.
‘That’s her. I didn’t see her leave. I was busy in the kitchen that day, sorting the cupboards out.’
Gina’s shoulders dropped in disappointment. ‘Do you remember what time it was?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m retired. Time means nothing to me. I know it was after midday as Don was well and truly ready for his sandwiches, weren’t you, love.’
Gina pursed her lips together as she thought. She took a step back into the rain and drew her gaze back to Dale’s house. Their houses were attached and her next question was going to be a long shot. ‘Did you hear anything coming from the house?’
‘It was quiet for most of the time but I did hear what I thought to be shouting at one point. I really couldn’t grasp what was being said. We may be neighbours but these houses are pretty old and the walls are thick. I didn’t want to listen, especially when the dog started to bark so I put the radio on. I did hear his front door slam a few minutes later and after that it was quiet. I assume that’s when she left. Has something happened?’
Gina passed the couple her card. ‘We are looking for the woman in the photo, her name is Susan and she’s currently missing. All we’re doing at the moment is trying to trace her whereabouts on the day. We also need to get hold of Dale. If you see him, can you please call me?’
Don and his wife nodded.
‘Is he in trouble,’ the woman said as she wrapped her chunky cardigan around her body.
‘No one’s in any trouble, not that we know of. We just need to either speak to the woman in the photo or Mr Blair.’
Don nodded and placed her card in the front of their letter rack. ‘We’ll definitely call you if we see anyone come back.’
Squelching in her shoes to the car, Gina struggled to stay upright on the sopping wet drive.
‘You’re back. Did you find anything out?’
She nodded as she wiped the rain from her face with the insides of her stretched sleeve. ‘They both saw Susan arrive at Dale’s house. Neither knows exactly when that was but it was after midday. The man, Don Fellow, saw her arrive as he left his house to do a job. His wife remembers seeing Susan also when she saw her husband off. There’s something else.’
Jacob popped another sweet into his mouth and waited for her to continue.
‘Mrs Fellows heard shouting coming from Dale’s house. If someone had come to your house to help with your paperwork, there wouldn’t be any reason to use raised voices. At the moment, I’m thinking that Susan knew Dale Blair better than we think. How and why? We need to know the connection between them.’ She grabbed her phone and pressed the number for the station and Wyre answered. ‘It’s Harte. There’s a connection between Susan Wheeler and Dale Blair. Can you start digging deeper straight away? Check the schools they went to, places they’ve worked. We have to find out how they knew each other.’
‘Course, guv. Kapoor and I are heading back in a short while, we’re just at the bridge. See you soon,’ Wyre replied.
Jacob screamed in pain as she ended the call. ‘I think I need a filling.’ He grabbed the bag of sweets and threw them into the glove compartment before slamming it closed.
‘Back to the station, then.’
Eighteen
I grin as I emerge from the darkness. ‘Oi, chubby. Look at me.’ I lay another punch into his face savouring the moment when I hear the thwack of skin on skin. Susan makes squeaky noises through her nose from the other room. ‘Shut the hell up.’
Through glassy eyes, he stares up from the rotten floor, water dripping in from the roof onto his shoulder. I pull the rope from the crumbling bench and start playing with it. He shivers in the torchlight, his shadow making him look like he’s convulsing. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’
The man lets out a pained groan from under the rag. I see his eyes, pleading with me to stop. Never. This is all going too well.
‘It’s nice getting the old gang back together, all of us coming together where it all began. I could say that I missed you but that would be a lie.’ My knee crunches as I kneel down and sit next to the shaking man, nudging him as I laugh again. ‘Cosy this.’ I crack open a can of pop and swig it back, belching as I place the can down. I know he’d love a drink but he’s not having one. I stand in front of him and pull the rope, flexing it out. His eyes widen as he tries to wriggle out of his binds.
‘We used to like playing games, all of us. Let’s have a play.’
As I lean in, my little chubby friend topples off the chair and tries to wriggle
along the floor, scraping his torso on the wood, glass and grit, bleeding a trail as he inches away. ‘Wiggle away, my little chubby worm.’
He could wiggle all he liked, there was no way out. A piercing scream fills the air. ‘Shut up, Susie, or I’m going to have to come and shove a rag right down your gullet. Is that what you want?’ I stare right into the wriggler’s eyes. My muscles tingle as I think of revenge. ‘I love it that our little gang is nearly back together. It’s just like old times.’ I stamp on his back. That’s as far as I’ll allow him to get.
Nineteen
‘Did you find anything new?’ Gina said as she removed her rain-drenched coat and threw it over a spare desk.
‘You only called me a short while ago but I am a speedy worker.’ Wyre beamed a big smile as she clipped her damp hair up. ‘Didn’t the rain come down?’
Gina nodded as she began removing her shoes. ‘Just ignore me. That’s the last time I buy cheap shoes from the internet.’ She removed the flat slip-ons and began peeling her soggy socks off. ‘Sorry about this but my feet and socks are clean. They’re just soaking, bloody wet.’ She dropped the socks in a carrier bag. Smith continued working on his computer while Jacob leaned over him, chatting and pointing at the screen.
‘I see you got caught in it too. What a storm!’ Wyre said.
Gina wiped her face with her sleeve, imagining the smeared mascara streaks. ‘Nightmare day. What have we got?’
‘Dale went to the local catholic school, Saint John’s. He also went to Cleevesford Primary. Susan went to Cleevesford High. She went to a primary school in Worcester before her family moved to the area. They didn’t go to school together. They are close in age. Dale: thirty-five. Susan: thirty-four. Their paths could have crossed but I haven’t found anything to suggest they did. They were from different sides of the town. The only thing this tells us is that they weren’t school friends. They may have hung around out of school or had friends in common. I did take the initiative to see if Dale and Susan had any Facebook friends in common. There are loads so I emailed them to you. This was easy enough to access. No one stood out but all of them may need looking into. We’ll make a start.’
‘Thanks for that.’
O’Connor pushed open the office door. ‘Whoa, it smells like wet dog in here.’
‘That’ll be guv’s soggy socks,’ Smith said as he turned in his chair.
‘Thanks for that.’ Gina felt her face reddening. ‘Sorry about the socks. They’ll be gone before you know it – in the bin.’
Gina slipped her cold dry feet back into her damp shoes, cringing as her toes touched the chilly curve at the end, making a little squelch sound. Grabbing her coat and socks, she passed O’Connor. ‘Have you looked up the area that postcode covers, the one on Susan Wheeler’s pad?’
‘It covers half of Beech Street.’ He rummaged through the pile of paper on his desk and eventually found what he was looking for underneath a mouldy cup. A pile of Post-it notes fluttered to the ground. ‘Here it is, not too far from Dale Blair’s house. She could have parked there and walked.’
‘Michaela Daniels, the dog woman, said she seemed to be in a rush. If she was in a rush, why wouldn’t she park right outside Dale Blair’s house? He was her next appointment. Let’s have a look, get my bearings.’
Gina stared at the small map and flicked it. ‘Two streets behind where he lived. I know it’s not making sense to me but was the Beech Street appointment next on her list? Wyre?’
‘Yes, guv.’ Wyre tucked a loose strand of black hair behind her ear and sat poised with her notebook. Ever efficient Wyre, the most attentive of her team.
‘That list of Facebook friends in common between Dale and Susan, try to find out if any of them live on Beech Street. I appreciate that that won’t be an easy task as people use maiden names, married names and even fake names but give it your best and see what we come back with.’
‘On it, guv.’ She swivelled back to her screen and took a bite from her apple. Everyone else had almost finished the cake off but Wyre, Gina knew, only ate cake on rare occasions. Gina gazed at her, feeling a slight pang of admiration wash over her. She wished she could be fitter, healthier and more in control of her emotions, but that wasn’t how she was built. Her emotions were either her weakness or her superpower. She let out a little laugh, she definitely wasn’t sporting any superpowers. She grabbed one of the last slices of sponge that had been wrapped in a serviette.
‘I’m going to dry off a little, then I think I owe Mary another visit. I still don’t feel I know the family and I want to get a feel for the dynamics. I want to find out what they’re not telling me. Get a family liaison officer on standby. They might garner more than I can.’
O’Connor nodded as he turned his electric heater on.
‘Keep trying Dale Blair too, organise for uniform to keep popping by. He’ll have to surface at some point.’
O’Connor put his thumb up as he turned away and opened his email.
Dale and Susan had been shouting in his kitchen. What about? Susan hadn’t been seen since. She needed more on Dale. They needed him to call or they needed to be able to search his house but she knew all she had was speculation and that wasn’t enough for a warrant. They could have been jokingly arguing about her rates or it could have even been his television making all the noise.
Don Fellow’s wife heard someone leave Dale’s house. She assumed it was Susan. No one actually saw Susan leave Dale’s house. And where was he? ‘Smith, will you also organise a door to door on Dale Blair’s street. I need to know if anyone saw Susan Wheeler leave. We are struggling to get an accurate time of her arrival too. Any information will help but we need to get out and talk to the neighbours.’
‘I’ll get Kapoor onto it. I know they’re all stretched but I’m sure a couple of officers could get over there.’ He grabbed his phone.
She took a bite out of the cake. Cake for breakfast and cake for lunch – not a good food day. If Susan had needed a bit of space or had some sort of breakdown, Gina was sure that someone would have heard something. The area had been well checked, especially in some of the known spots where… Gina didn’t want to think about those areas. The bridges mostly, the trees in the woods, the places where people go when they feel they can no longer face life. Where people go in their darkest day, hour, minute, second. Coughing, Gina wrapped up the rest of the cake as she shifted the crumbs in her throat.
Gina looked down and tried to will away the chill that was running down her spine. Maybe Susan was just better at hiding than the others, like an animal, crawling under a rock to die. No – she had to be alive. She had no reason to believe anything bad had happened to Susan – not yet. Her hand gripped the cake and it oozed out of the tissue. She wouldn’t be finishing it anyway.
Twenty
Phoebe ran down the cut through at the back of the school field still fed up with the text her dad had sent.
Running late at work, be fifteen minutes max. Wait for me. Dad. Xxx.
Her dad was always running late and the past couple of days he was constantly popping out and telling her to look after her sister. Her mum would never leave them alone. She wasn’t to tell her mum though, her dad had made her promise. Important things, that’s what he’d called them, like she and Jasmine weren’t important enough.
She wished her mum was back. ‘She’s just having a little break. She’ll be back soon,’ they kept saying but Phoebe didn’t believe them – she heard her dad talking on the phone to her Aunty Clare on a few occasions about something that they must keep a secret. She’d tried to listen in to their conversations but he’d slammed the door on her and scurried off into his bedroom. They all treat her like she’s five, not eleven. She knew what was going on. Her mum had abandoned them. She had known something was wrong at home when she sat in her bedroom every night, listening to her mum sobbing.
She checked her phone again. Text after text that she’d sent to her mum had been ignored.
She wished J
asmine was with her so that they could talk. Since her mum and dad had split, they’d become closer. They’d fought mostly up until that point but Jasmine had started sleeping in her bed when she’d started getting the nightmares. They weren’t like her mum’s nightmares where she’d scream the house down and thrash the bedclothes everywhere, they were more like bad dreams. It didn’t matter that Jasmine always wore her clothes or used her favourite hair conditioner, not any more. Her poor little sister really thought their mother was never coming back.
Her father wasn’t worried though and Phoebe chose not to worry either. She understood that sometimes, adults were just complicated. Complicated was her mother’s favourite word.
Her phone lit up and she answered, ‘Jasmine.’
‘Got here safe. Tell Dad that Bryony’s mum will drop me off around eight.’
A pang of jealousy hit her as Jasmine ended the call. Phoebe’s friends never invited her over any more. In fact, she wondered if they were still friends as they’d taken to ignoring her at lunchtime. They’d huddle on another table, glancing her way and giggling. She’d had it with trying to get in with the popular kids. Tomorrow, she’d head back to the ‘losers table’ with the other geeks, where she belonged.
She pulled a strand of hair and began sucking it as she read the graffiti on the old battered seesaw. It was the ‘f’ word, the one she’d never be allowed to say. She said it once when she tried to get in with the cool kids but failed to look cool in the same way they do. She simply looked awkward as she checked to see if any teachers were listening. That was the day they’d planted chewing gum in her curly hair. She didn’t tell her mum even though she asked why a chunk of her hair was missing after she had to cut it out.
